Yesterday was a similar, windless, cloudless day. We set off with no, when is the sail coming, sort of worry and wended our way to the start line. The race today was called the ‘Butterfly’ and consisted of various legs, vaguely resembling a butterfly. Our start was, again, not bad, we were right at the windward end of the line however as the leg was very short - a mile, and the line quite long, it turned out that those starting at the leeward end had an advantage in being able to point higher to get to the 1st mark, with the light wind this made them quicker. We essentially followed the Brazilian Swan 55 around and never caught her. yesterday’s winner, Legacy was up with the leaders as was the Swiss Swan. At the end the finish line was pretty much on the same line as we were coming from, we crossed it, without thinking, in the same way as everyone else at the time from North to South, however a boat about 10 minutes behind us queried the committee who, eventually, said that, no - they were taking times of all boats across the line but that the line should be crossed South to North. We immediately tacked back and crossed it again, however it was about 20 minutes after our initial crossing. We then returned to dock and settled in for the night.
In the evening we went up to Shirley Heights for the sunset, we had been going to have sundowners up there but the bar was closed and we had not brought anything with us. our taxi driver seemed a little ‘high’ an elderly local gent who occasionally burst out into very high laughter or squealing and was quite difficult to understand owing to a lack of teeth. He was quite amusing however and took us through a couple of interesting sights on the way up and down. We had a very good dinner at Bar-bs and on the way back from there met up with Mark, Natalia, who have been sailing on ‘Pancakes’ but may join us for today as Pancake’s skipper / owner isn’t sure about this racing lark. They joined us for an hour or so and we went to bed. It was a hot night and I slept in the cockpit in a hammock and Katharine and Martin also slept on deck for the hottest part of the night, with Katharine staying on deck until the morning.
Today seems similar to yesterday so far although it’s rumoured to be more windy than yesterday, I’m about to have a look on the noticeboard to see if the course has been altered. Katharine, Martin and Sally leave us today and we need to go to immigration at 0800 to sign them off the boat so that they can get through the airport immigration.
Slainte Jock and Crew D.
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